


Five Times Petunia Evans Dursley Met Severus Snape

by nnozomi



Series: orchestra'verse [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-22
Updated: 2012-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-04 03:08:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In some ways, they understand one another better than anyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Petunia Evans Dursley Met Severus Snape

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the orchestra'verse AU, although not specially musical. For the record, there were no Voldemort wars; the offstage deaths in the story happened in a broom accident. A few details will eventually be clarified in other fics.

(the first time)

Tuney at eleven knows the difference between her family and the Snapes: the difference between “poor” and “shiftless.” The Evans family may not have much to be going on with, but Dad went out to work every day until he hurt his back, and now that he’s on disability Mum goes out instead, and they own their own house, even if it’s a little cottage where Tuney and Lily share a room hardly big enough for one. Mum makes sure they’re always neat and clean (Tuney’s old enough to do the cleaning now, and she is proud that the house and their clothes are always as tidy as they were before Mum started going to work). Dad doesn’t drink, or yell at Mum, and Dad and Mum would never hit their girls.

The differences between the Evans family and the Snape household are not hard to see.

Tuney was horrified when Lily started playing with the Snape boy, Sev, earlier this year. Lily is a year younger than she is, and there is nothing in the world Tuney loves so much. Lily is quick and bright and beautiful, and if the Snape boy lays a finger on her, or says anything mean or vulgar to her, Tuney will make sure he never comes around again.

She’s dumbfounded when Lily tells her—and shows her—what she and Sev have in common. Tuney was never much of a reader—Lily’s the one with all those library books collecting overdue fees under her bed, which will come out of her meager allowance and occasionally Tuney’s too—and the idea that magic could be a real thing seems like just one of Lily’s fantasies. It takes a long time and a number of demonstrations (Lily makes Sev do it too) until she believes.

She and Sev don’t like each other, especially during that period. It makes good sense to Tuney that Lily would be magical if anybody would, but she can’t see what magic has to do with that scrawny, greasy-haired boy in his hand-me-down clothes. (Most of Lily’s clothes are Tuney’s hand-me-downs, but that’s different.) And he glares at her, and mutters under his breath, and one day, after Tuney’s watched him make a rock fly across a clearing without ever touching it, she shrugs and turns away and he says something to Lily that she can’t quite hear.

Before either of them knows what’s happened, Lily has dropped the twig she was holding (“it’s my wand until I can have a real one”), planted both her hands on Sev’s thin chest, and shoved him so hard he sprawls flat on his back. Tuney hears the dull thud of his body hitting the ground, and sees his eyes go wide in panic for a moment, the wind knocked out of him. Before he can remember how to breathe, Lily is standing over him foursquare and raising her voice: “Severus Snape, don’t you ever dare say anything bad about my sister! Ever!”

“Lily—“ Sev croaks, wincing as he tries to sit up.

“Lily!” Tuney’s voice drowns his out. “You _know_ it’s not nice to hit people!”

Lily’s mouth drops open (and so does Sev’s, but Tuney isn’t looking). “But Tuney, he called you—“

“I don’t care,” and she doesn’t want to know. “Mum and Dad have told you not to hit. Use your words. You can do that!”

“…Yes, Tuney,” Lily says meekly, and glares down at Sev one last time. “I won’t hit you again. But you remember.”

Sev glares back, but he’s no match for Lily’s look. “Fine,” he mutters. Tuney makes haste to get away from there before Lily can make him apologize to her.

(She doesn’t have to thank Lily for defending her; there are things you can take for granted when you’re sisters. Later, Lily asks her if it’s all right to hit someone with magic, and Tuney is still thinking about that one when Lily gets on the train at Kings Cross.)

 

(the second time)

Tunia goes to bed early these days. Maybe some nineteen-year-olds stay up late going to pubs with their friends, but her job as a cleaner at the works wears her out. Still, it’s the best job she’s had—the pay is much better than working as a shop assistant, and she likes it better, too. The other girls think she’s mad. They hate the drab coverall, let alone the work itself. But Tunia’s always liked cleaning, the physical satisfaction of it and the way a room or a shirt or a bowl will look nicer once she’s done.

She’s sliding peacefully away into oblivion when there’s a thud and a creak downstairs, and she freezes, shivering in the warm room, thinking of burglars. Should she wake Mum and Dad…? call 999? No, there’s a familiar giggle, she relaxes, it’s Lily. Wasn’t she staying with friends tonight? Who has she brought home—that boyfriend? Surely she wouldn’t. It’s not that Tunia dislikes James Potter exactly, but the way he can’t tell the difference between “this is the way Muggles do things” (and she wishes Lily wouldn’t use that word so much) and “this is the way poor people do things” sets her teeth on edge. It was inevitable that Lily would date someone from her magic school, but can’t she find a nice working-class wizard boy?

Now she’s thoroughly awake. Tunia rolls out of bed, puts on her thin toweling robe, and starts downstairs.

The tiny kitchen seems almost full with only two people in it: Lily, flushed and bright-eyed and her hair a mess, in the pink silk party dress Tunia made her last year. (She knows it’s a myth that redheads can’t wear pink, at least where Lily is concerned.) And Severus Snape. Tunia can’t remember offhand when she saw him last, but he’s taller than she is now, and actually looking almost respectable, in a dark suit and white shirt, with his heavy dark hair tied back at the nape of his neck. If his hair were shorter (and his shirt front a bit less grubby) he could almost get a job in the real world, she thinks.

Lily looks up when her sister comes in, and laughs. “Tuney! Did we wake you? I’m sorry.” She takes her wand out of somewhere (Tunia _knows_ there’s nowhere in that dress you could store a wand) and says something like “Muffle.” “There, now we won’t wake Mum and Dad. Do you mind terribly? We were at Deborah Vine’s Leaving party—she’s just got accepted for Auror training, it’s brilliant—and Sev was still hungry after it was over, so I said I’d make him toasted cheese. We didn’t mean to wake you.”

Tunia looks from her sister to—her sister’s friend, still?—and decides not to ask. “Let me do it,” she says. “You oughtn’t to cook in that dress, you’ll get grease spots on it. Move over.”

“You don’t have to,” Severus says stiffly, a deeper voice than she remembers. “You’re under no obligation to cook for me.”

“Neither is my sister,” Tunia retorts. “Can you make toasted cheese yourself?”

His sallow cheeks turn slightly darker. “Well—“

“He could if you taught him,” Lily suggests impishly, looking closer to eight than eighteen. “Sev is brilliant at Potions, you know, he’s supposed to be the genius of our age or something—“

“Give it a rest, Evans!”

“—and cooking is just Potions, really. Go on, Tuney, show him how!”

If they have one thing in common, it’s that they’ve never learned to resist Lily. So Tunia spends the small hours of that morning teaching Severus Snape how to make toasted cheese (she even does it the fancy way Dad’s Welsh grandmother used to) and agreeing reluctantly that he does learn awfully fast, and then eating toasted cheese around the kitchen table with Severus and Lily.

“I told you,” Lily crows, Worcestershire sauce on her cheek. (Tunia’s made her put an apron over her dress before she starts eating.) “Think of it, Sev, now you can make it for—“

“Shut up!” Severus hisses, but he’s scarlet. Tunia, nibbling decorously, gets the idea. To her surprise, she’s almost a little sorry that he seems to have learned to look at someone who isn’t Lily.

 

(the third time)

Petunia knows the matron of honor shouldn’t be in floods of tears, but she can’t help it. This is the second happiest day of her life, and if she were absolutely honest she’d have to think long and hard before choosing her own wedding as the happiest.

Lily is so beautiful in her white dress. (Thank heaven it doesn’t have to be pink: Petunia is pretty sure Lily and James have been up to things for a long time now, but witches must have sensible ways of managing.) James in his morning suit is handsome too, but she really can’t be bothered looking at him: her eyes are full of her little sister, red hair shining on her shoulders, cream-freckled skin glowing, wide mouth struggling constantly not to curl into a smile. She has to sniffle again, and Vernon surreptitiously hands her a hankie.

Most of the wedding guests are magic people, of course, James’ family and their friends from school. Mum and Dad do valiantly with them. They don’t stay for much of the reception: Dad is failing these days, and Petunia is secretly afraid he won’t be around to see his grandchildren. But at least now he’s seen both his daughters married.

Vernon puts up stolidly with his sister-in-law’s odd connections. He still doesn’t really believe in magic—not that he thinks Petunia and Lily are lying, but he doesn’t take it very seriously, and is still liable to dismiss most of what he actually sees as parlor tricks. Still, if that’s what makes Lily and her bloke happy, he doesn’t mind it.

Petunia says hello to those of Lily’s friends she’s kept in touch with from primary school, most of them wearing expressions like Vernon’s: Emily, Aggie, Ranjit, who’s wearing a pumpkin-colored sari that strikes Petunia as very beautiful and not quite nice. A few of the girls from the magic school take the trouble to greet Petunia, which she appreciates: Deborah, Alice, Garnet. There’s always someone playing music during the reception; Petunia doesn’t know much about classical music, but she quite likes it if she doesn’t have to listen too hard.

She’s just congratulating Aggie on her engagement ring when she sees Severus Snape. He’s hanging back in one corner, catching nobody’s eye, looking suddenly just like the ragtag little boy in the clearing she remembers from the days before Lily went away to school.

Disappointed after all at losing Lily to James? she wonders, with a complicated touch of regret that reaches her only distantly through her haze of happiness. Hadn’t Lily said something about him having a girlfriend, though?

He doesn’t look quite like a scorned lover, though, she decides, considering the tall slight figure slumping against the wall. Tired, cheeks hollowed out, eyelids swollen—as if he’s had a long hard job of work, or lost someone to death instead of marriage.

Then she sees the redhaired man buttonholing Vernon at the buffet table, asking him in a cheerful honking voice about “Muggle devices—I’m a fan, you know! You must be a great expert—it would be so interesting to—“ and she has to go over to rescue her poor husband.

 

(the fourth time)

Tuney can’t cry. The world around her is black and white, two-dimensional. It’s not empty—it still has Vernon, and her Dudley—but it’s a world with no Lily, something that ought to be impossible. She can’t even cry over it, it’s too big. She goes through the motions every day, and tells Vernon she’s all right and is even grateful for his clumsy attempts to clean up after himself—although she really wishes he wouldn’t. She would clean from dawn to midnight if she could, doing something that leaves results, something that tires her out enough to sleep. She looks at Dudley and feels as if something is tearing her chest apart when she thinks that he’s too young to remember Lily.

She’s alone in the house, some unspecified number of days after the letter comes. Vernon is at work, and his mum has Dudley for the day—“to give poor Pet a bit of a rest.” She can’t say she doesn’t want a rest. She doesn’t hear the knock on the door at first, but the second time she goes dully to open it, expecting nothing, because there’s one person it can’t be.

Severus Snape is standing on the doorstep.

Tuney bursts into tears. She is vaguely horrified to hear herself sobbing, but the physical relief of being able to cry is so great she can’t care. After a moment, she manages to back away from the door and get him to come in after her.

They sit down in the drawing room, but it’s a long time before Tuney can do anything but cry. Severus doesn’t cry with her, or put his arms around her (she’d be shocked if he did) or say anything to her at all; but just when the storm of tears subsides, she finds a steaming cup of tea in front of her and remembers, faintly, hearing the kettle whistle. He’s made it for her the “Muggle” way, the way she would make a cup of tea, and she’s pathetically grateful for that.

She wipes her face carefully on one of Vernon’s big hankies and sips her tea. Her teeth chatter on the rim of the teacup. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, hoarse from crying.

Severus clears his throat painfully. “So am I.”

“I feel as if the world’s ended,” she hears herself say, probably the single most foolish thing she’s ever said, but it rings true. She’s too embarrassed to look at his face; she watches his hands (large and bony and strong-looking) on his knees. He’s wearing ordinary clothes, old jeans and a heavy gray sweater.

“Why not?” he says after a moment, as hoarse as she is. “It has.” She looks at his face now, surprised, and sees that though his dark eyes are dry, he looks as bad as he did at the wedding—worse, tired out and miserable, deep in grief. He looks the way she feels, and it helps, bitter as it is, to have a companion in sorrow.

They drink tea.

“I came to ask you something,” he says abruptly, with the lack of social graces she remembers. “It’s about—it’s—about Harry.”

“Yes,” Tuney hears herself say, before he goes on.

Severus blinks. “Yes what? I mean—“

“Yes. I want Harry. I want him to come and live here.” Something hot flows through her and she lifts her head. “That’s what you were going to ask, isn’t it? I want him here.” Now that she’s heard her nephew’s name, she knows her plan as if it had always been true. “I don’t care about magic or—or Muggles or whatever, we’ll send him to the magic school if he wants to go, but he’s my—my—my sister’s boy, Lily’s boy, and I loved Lily more than anything in the world—“ she’s crying again but she doesn’t care—“and I’ll raise him with my own boy. I can do it—we can do it, my family. See if we can’t.”

“I’ll tell them,” Severus whispers, and as she wipes her eyes again she sees him wipe his own.

 

(the fifth time)

This month Pet is ready. When the owl comes, Vernon holds on to it for her while she clumsily attaches her own letter to the ring on its leg. “It won’t bite me, will it Pet?” he wants to know, scowling down at the feathery lump.

“I don’t think so. If it does, I don’t think it will draw blood,” Pet answers absently. There, done! “You can let go now, dear.” And see what you think of that, Albus Dumbledore.

She expects another owl to bring an answer to her letter, but it comes with a knock on the door two days later. Vernon is on shift and Harry and Dudley at the kindergarten. Pet takes off her apron and answers the door.

She remembers Dumbledore from the memorial service for Lily and James: long white beard, long robes, all that nonsense. She’s a bit embarrassed that a figure out of a children’s book is standing here on her doorstep. Then her eyes move past his shoulder and see the tall dark shadow behind him: Severus Snape.

It’ll be all right now. “Won’t you come in?” Pet says, and shows them into the drawing room.

When she’s settled them with three cups of tea and a plate of biscuits (Rich Tea, because the Jaffa Cakes are the boys’ favorites and she wants to save them), Dumbledore clears his throat gently and smiles at her. “Thank you for your letter, Petunia.”

_Mrs. Dursley_ , she wants to tell him, but she doesn’t. It’s funny, she doesn’t hate the other people from Lily’s world, but she can’t bring herself to like Dumbledore. Well, she knows why.

“I was rather surprised, I must say,” he goes on pleasantly. “I hadn’t realized you weren’t receiving enough money for Harry’s upkeep—you should have contacted me sooner! No one would have had you run short.”

“I don’t think you can have read my letter very carefully, Mr. Dumbledore,” Pet says stiffly. “I didn’t say we were short. My husband earns a good wage, and I’m a good manager if I do say so myself.” She feels as if he’s insulted her thrift, the second rudest thing he could say to her (at least he didn’t imply she kept a dirty house). “But we’re Harry’s guardians and it should be for us to manage his allowance. There’s a Barclays branch quite near here, you know. If you were to open an account there in Harry’s name, my husband and I could withdraw money for him when he needed it, instead of having to ask you each time.” She sees his eyes flicker, and adds sharply, “You needn’t worry that we would use the money for our own ends—and if you can’t trust us, we’d be glad to account for each withdrawal. And of course, when Harry’s old enough we’d turn the bankbook over to him.”

“You’re going too fast for me, Petunia,” Dumbledore twinkles. “Of course if it’s a burden on you to contact the wizarding world regularly, we could arrange something of the sort, but…” This one’s a master at twisting words, Pet thinks resentfully.

“Headmaster.” Severus’ deep voice. “I would be glad to perform regular…audits…if that would set your mind at rest.”

Dumbledore dips a Rich Tea biscuit thoughtfully in his tea, and takes his time savoring it before he speaks. “From you, Severus, that comes as a rather…convincing…testimonial. Very well then, if that is what everyone prefers? The negotiations between Gringotts and Barclays ought not to take too long. And I trust you will still feel free to contact me, Petunia, any time you feel in need of my help.”

In a pig’s eye, you meddling old man, Pet thinks with a good deal more vulgarity than she usually allows herself. “Of course, Mr. Dumbledore,” she says politely. “Thank you for your help.”

“Nothing at all, my dear, I do assure you.” Dumbledore eats another biscuit and drains his cup. “And thank you for your hospitality. I’ll just be going then. Severus, I may leave you to work out the details?”

“Yes, Headmaster.” Severus has finished his tea but hasn’t touched the biscuits. He’s still too thin, Pet thinks absently.

She breathes easier once Dumbledore was out the door, and thinks Severus does too. “I’m sorry for involving you in this,” she offers.

“Part of my job,” he replies sharply. “The most junior teacher is always lumbered with the odd jobs. And of course, it doesn’t hurt that I know the town here.”

“Well…thank you. It’s not the money,” she adds, wanting him to understand as she didn’t with the headmaster. “It’s…” _our pride,_ she can’t quite say. “Harry’s ours, our family’s. We’re not just…minding him for someone else.”

Severus stands up slowly, shaking hair off his face. He looks better than he once did, she thinks—he’ll always be thin and sallow, but that spent, used-up look is gone now, and his eyes are alive. “I know,” he says, and then, so quietly she can hardly make out the words, “You and Lily taught me about family.”

Before she can think of what to say to that, he says “I’ll be in touch with you about the bank account. Consider it done,” and he’s gone.

Pet sits down and eats a biscuit, and has to stop after a while to wipe her eyes. When she’s putting Dudley and Harry to bed that night, she tells them a story about the three children playing in the woods once upon a time, the two sisters, one red and one blond, and the dark boy who was their friend.  


End file.
